Green River Pottery

First light in the studio:
July 21, 2010

Platter with Shino Glaze
July 2010

Teapot & Tray
July 2010

This Month at Green River Pottery: July 2010

 

'Introduction'

"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read."

- William Blake, Introduction,
Songs of Innocence & Experience

 

This summer it’s as hot as it was in 1997, and today, July 21st, is as hot as July 21st was back then—the day my son was born. Just before dawn. On that morning when the sun rose the light was especially yellow, especially sharp, especially warm.

I had just gotten a potter’s wheel, and was just getting the itch to build a kiln—I could tell already that renting space at the communal clay studio wasn’t going to cut it and that I was going to have to re-configure my life to accommodate not just fatherhood but a creative life of my own, too. Today as the alarm goes off—right about that same time, sunrise—I enter the studio and feel a slight breath of coolness left from the night air hovering about the room. It’ll be a good day to work. I’ll have all day, and there’s an entire kiln load of bisque ware to get glazed.

In those first weeks after my son was born, thirteen years ago, I remember a change in my perception of time, as subtle and pervasive as the change in the light. He didn’t care if it was day or night—I would take him on a long walk at two in the morning, then fall asleep for a few hours with him at midday. It was all the same. The hours ran together into a constant unfolding present. That was a good thing for me to learn just then, since it’s always like that in the studio. If I’m lucky, I’ll just work today till I’m done, and it might be six, or midnight, there’s really no way to know, nor does it really matter. Always in the background, when I’m working, I can still feel the transformation that my son’s birth brought about, hanging in the air as I move in my dusty Crocs over the glaze-spattered floor. There’s only the one moment—and also that same call to work, to get busy, that I hear in Blake’s Introduction to the Songs of Experience.

My father was a Blake scholar. He died when I was thirteen, but I have his copy of the Songs, all marked up, some of the poems with every line underlined in his heavy blue pen. He never said much to me about Blake, or if he did I don’t remember; but for some reason, the summer my son was born, I started reading the Songs of Innocence and Experience. I had tried before but didn’t understand a word. All of a sudden they made total sense. I was amazed by their frankness about childhood and about fatherhood. The poems were so clear, and so true! This was the only book on parenting I ever read.

I used to read out loud from this book to my son all the time, that first summer, and for his first year or so. Just out of curiosity, the other day I read a little to him again. “Sound familiar?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Really?” I said, hearing in my own voice the same dry, amused tone that I remember in my father’s. “I used to read these to you quite a bit when you were little. Quite little, though. Maybe you don’t remember.”

That got his attention. He looked up at me and shook his head again with all the defiant certainty of the early-teen. “No Dad, you didn’t. You couldn’t have—I’ve never heard any of this before.”

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